


A Maybe-Love-Story of Potential Chance Meetings

by lurknomoar



Series: Bits and Pieces and Older Writings [22]
Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Enemies to Lovers, M/M, Other, POV Outsider, Typical Night Vale Weirdness, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-31
Updated: 2020-10-31
Packaged: 2021-03-09 06:15:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 853
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27309754
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lurknomoar/pseuds/lurknomoar
Summary: An angel and a hooded figure keep crossing paths, again and again. Is it fate? Is it accident? Is one of them doing it on purpose? (Written for an unlikely pairings challenge back in 2014.)
Relationships: Angel/Hooded Figure, Carlos/Cecil Palmer
Series: Bits and Pieces and Older Writings [22]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1467382
Kudos: 15





	A Maybe-Love-Story of Potential Chance Meetings

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this back in 2014, so it is more or less compliant with canon-as-it-was-back-then. Cecil is the voice of Night Vale, Carlos is trapped somewhere else, and angels don't exist.

We know very little about angels, and we know very little about hooded figures, but we know that both (neither) exist in the town of Night Vale, observing and sometimes interfering in specific ways. Let’s assume, maybe, that an angel and a hooded figure keep showing up to observe the same phenomena. The angel records a transient group of nocturnal mothmen that the hooded figure is meant to keep a secret. The hooded figure needs to steal a baby for the other hooded figures to raise into one of their own, and they accidentally choose the child of a woman who has a guardian angel by her side. The angels need to take a bloodstone for their own secret purposes (to fix the heater at Old Woman Josie’s house), but the hooded figure occupying the bloodstone circle is in the middle of a complex and nefarious ritual. And so on, month after month after incomprehensible time vortex.

They keep meeting again and again, but the thing is, they can never be certain that it’s one other specific person they keep meeting. After all, the hooded figures all wear hoods, that’s kind of the point of them, and it’s not always easy to tell the identity of an angel with all the multiple heads and too many eyes and dear god the feathers, especially since angels don’t exist. Their counterpart could be a different person each time, for all they know. They themselves could be a different person each time, for all they know. The hooded figures sacrificed their names and faces and their very fingerprints for a lower purpose, and it does not, should not matter to them who they are out of many. And angels all live in the flicker between existing and not-existing, where sharing a name spares them all sorts of agonizing questions such as whether their existence is continuous or constantly re-determined by a toss of unknown dice in unknown hands. Even you, dear reader, cannot be sure if this is a story about two people meeting again and again, or if it is about meetings between pairs of somewhat similar strangers. They don’t know if it is the same person they keep meeting, but all that matters is that they suspect it is. They hope it is.

They don’t interact with each other, not directly. They don’t know how, not without violating the rules that bind their existence to a semblance of comprehensibility. But they do interact with the town. This is the only thing they both know for sure: they love Night Vale. And they love the voice of Night Vale. So the only point of contact between the two becomes the protection of Night Vale, a simultaneous decision to stop hindering the other when it comes to the sacred unholy duty of standing guard over their little desert town, and start helping them instead. Maybe the hooded figure scrawls a glowing glyph on a wall that lets the angel find the nest of eye-eating butterflies in time. Maybe the angel hums a song that other people in town pick up and start humming, and months later the hooded figure knows what the correct sequence of notes to pacify the Dreadgod of Sloths, He Who Hangs Upside-Down From The Sun, the Mighty Mermungarh. Maybe the hooded figure takes a nice, quilted and hardly at all blood-stained blanket from the bed of someone who won’t be needing it anymore, and leaves it on the porch of Old Woman Josie. Not that Erika ever feels the cold, but Old Woman Josie does, and keeping Old Woman Josie warm is the closest they ever come to feeling warmth themselves. And when yet another disaster is narrowly averted, and Cecil Palmer crows his triumph into the radio, maybe mentioning hooded figures and non-existent angels and maybe not, two people in the town stop for a single second between their urgent duties, and spare a secret furtive thought for each other.

And then one day, the greatest plan they ever put into motion finally pays off. For months they whispered inspiration into the uneasy dreams of ever-terrified research assistants and scrawled eldritch symbols into desert sand and politely negotiated with cacti to bear no flowers that season and whistled shrill noises on the wind to weaken the fabric of reality, and finally it was time. A world blinks, a reality shrugs, a rainstorm rages, a door opens and a beautiful scientist staggers out of it. And in that moment, Night Vale is voiceless with joy, the radio playing only white noise as Cecil Palmer runs out into the street to throw his arms around his Carlos, and kiss and kiss and accidentally bump noses and kiss. Two beings look on their fierce clumsy happiness, and know their town is the way it should be, the way it is meant to be, only better. They hold hands – no. They don’t exactly have hands, or the hands they use aren’t exactly theirs. But Erika stands still next to a hooded figure, and a white-feathered wing brushes against a long black sleeve.

They don’t speak.


End file.
